Search Results for: prisoner voting/page/47/ministers have been procrastinating on the issue, fearing that it will prove unpopular with the electorate.
4 January 2020 by Samuel March
Casamitjana v The League Against Cruel Sports (judgment pending)
In what multiple commentators have hailed as a landmark legal case, Norwich Employment Tribunal found that the Claimant’s “ethical veganism” is a philosophical belief and therefore a protected characteristic for the purposes of section 10 of the Equality Act 2010 (“s.10”) following a preliminary hearing on 2nd and 3rd January 2020.
The judgment is unlikely to be available for some time, so it is not yet possible to analyse the Tribunal’s reasoning, but the Hearing Bundle and Claimant’s Written Submissions of Claimant’s Counsel have been made available online by his solicitors which gives a clear indication of how the issue may have been decided.
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17 December 2018 by Guest Contributor
David Burrows is a solicitor advocate, trainer and writer.
Human rights and English marriage
On 10 December 2018 responses were due to the government’s divorce reform proposals, Reducing family conflict Reform of the legal requirements for divorce (September 2018). A reply to responses is due from the Government, says the Ministry of Justice, by 8 March 2019.
My response to the proposals – as I saw things then – is on my blog here. Thoughts of divorce reform throw up two important human rights issues: one a direct Article 6 question; and the other – which it is surely time for law reformers and the government to confront? – is a discrimination point (Art 14).
But first a little history. The then Labour government, on Leo Abse MP’s private member’s bill, passed with (more or less) approval of the Church of England, the Divorce Reform Act 1969 (in force from 1 January 1971). It was consolidated into Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 (MCA 1973) which represents the modern law and the modern statutory underpinning for financial distribution on divorce or nullity. Mirror provisions apply for same gender couples: Civil Partnership Act 2004. Wholly different finance rules apply for unmarried cohabitants.
Matrimonial causes
The Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 (MCA) section 1 is very simple. There is one ground for divorce: irretrievable breakdown of marriage (s 1(1)). To prove that ground a petitioner (P) must prove one or more of five facts: adultery; behaviour making it unreasonable for P to live with the other spouse/partner (R); desertion for two years; living apart for two (with consent); or five years.
Reformers – including from their inception, the group of family law solicitors, now Resolution – have objected to the blame inherent in the first two facts, and the tendency which this may produce to leave a nastier taste, than need be, in the mouth of divorcees.
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1 September 2010 by Adam Wagner
R (C) v Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis [2010] WLR (D) 193 – Read judgment
Last month, Matt Hill posted on a case relating to the retention of DNA profiles and fingerprints by the police, for which the full judgment is finally available. Permission has been granted for an appeal directly to the Supreme Court, and the outcome of that appeal may have interesting implications for the status of European Court of Human Rights decisions in domestic law.
It is worth revisiting the decision in order to extract some of the principles, as although not novel, they do highlight the difficulties for claimants who have taken a case to the European Court of Human Rights and won, but who are still waiting for their decision to be implemented by the UK government.
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1 January 2025 by Rosalind English
O v P and Q [2024] EWCA Civ 1577
(Jeremy Hyam KC and Alasdair Henderson of 1 Crown Office Row represented the mother in this case)
This was an appeal from a decision in the Divisional Court by Judd J in April 2024. The case raises a question at the core of the transgender debate involving young people: consent.
The young person at the centre of this litigation is now 16 years old. He was born female and started to identify as male in 2020 at the age of about 12.
His parents were estranged. In these circumstances his mother appealed against the refusal of her request for an adjournment of proceedings in which she sought a prohibited steps order and a best interests declaration in relation to her child, pending an assessment being undertaken by a private gender dysphoria clinic (Gender Plus), the first private gender dysphoria hormone clinic in the UK.
It was accepted that, now the young person was by now 16, no Gillick competence question arose (see Sir James Munby at [55] in An NHS Trust v. X [2021] EWHC 65 (Fam), [2021] 4 WLR 11, and MacDonald J at [48]-[49] in GK and LK v. EE [2023] EWCOP 49). It was also accepted that the young person was “impressive, hardworking and intelligent” and had no mental health problems.
Puberty Blockers and Cross-Sex Hormones: Policy Background
As Vos MR noted, a number of events coalesced to make this case a particularly sensitive one at the time of this appeal.
(i) the Cass Interim Review in 2022 led to the closure of the Tavistock clinic that had been in issue in Bell v. Tavistock;
(ii) on 12 March 2024, NHS England published a clinical policy concluding that there was not enough evidence to support the safety or clinical effectiveness of puberty blockers to make the treatment routinely available (outside a research protocol);
(iii) as the first instance judge recorded at [58], NHS Scotland had announced before the hearing that persons under 18 would not be prescribed cross-sex hormones;
(iv) on 21 March 2023, NHS England published a clinical commissioning policy laying down stringent eligibility and readiness requirements to be met before cross-sex hormones could be administered to those over 16;
(v) on 9 April 2024, NHS England wrote to all NHS gender dysphoria clinics asking them to defer offering first appointments to those under 18 “as an immediate response to Dr Cass’s advice that ‘extreme caution’ should be exercised before making a recommendation for [cross-sex hormones] in [children]”;
(vi) on 10 April 2024, the Cass Review was published*; and
(vii) on 11 December 2024 (the day before the hearing before the Court of Appeal), the government announced that the temporary embargo on the use of puberty blockers would be made indefinite (subject to a review in 2027).
* For the purposes of this case, the mother highlighted that the Cass Review had called into question the quality of the evidence on which hormone treatments for adolescents are based. Dr Cass says at page 13, for example, that “[t]he reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress”. Moreover, Dr Cass highlights new evidence about brain maturation continuing into the mid-20s, whilst it was originally thought to finish in adolescence. Dr Cass recommended that puberty blockers should only be available within a research protocol, and that recommendation has now been implemented.
The judge at first instance had said first that, whilst the findings of the Cass Review might turn out to be very significant, she did not think they justified her departure from Bell v. Tavistock and from Lieven J’s decision in AB v. CD and Tavistock [2021] EWHC 741 (Fam) (AB v. CD), which the Court of Appeal approved in Bell v. Tavistock.
Arguments before the Court
The father sought to terminate the proceedings begun by the mother on the ground that they were causing the young person significant distress.
The mother contended that the proceedings should be adjourned because the legal and regulatory landscape for gender dysphoria treatment was changing rapidly; the Cass review had only been published a week before the hearing before the judge; and Gender Plus was a private provider whose practices and procedures were diverging from the NHS approach. In these circumstances, it behoved the court to keep an eye on a case of this kind in a time of flux. The mother also argued, though not strenuously, that cases concerning treatment for gender dysphoria should be regarded as being in in a special category requiring judicial oversight wherever there was less than complete unanimity. If necessary, the mother submitted that the Court of Appeal should depart from its recent decision in R (Bell) v. Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust [2021] EWCA Civ 1363, [2022] 1 All ER 416.
The judge below had concluded that, while the Cass review might be significant, it did not justify a departure from the decision in Bell v Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust [2021] EWCA Civ 1363, [2022] 1 All E.R. 416, [2021] 9 WLUK 157, in which it was held that treatment with puberty blockers should not be distinguished from the consideration of contraception in Gillick, and that questions of Gillick competence were for doctors, not the courts. Judd J held there was no realistic basis upon which to override the young person’s consent to treatment by a regulated provider and that there was no legitimate purpose in adjourning the case.
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18 March 2019 by Dominic Ruck Keene
The Divisional Court in R (Chidlow) v HM Senior Coroner for Blackpool [2019] EWHC 581 has given a concise and authoritative judgment reiterating and summarising the current common law concerning causation in inquests. Given the ever increasing importance of inquests and their conclusions as preliminaries to civil litigation, as well the growing number of inquests being held into historical deaths, the judgment will doubtless be frequently cited over the coming months and years.
Mr Childlow brought the judicial review following the inquest into the death of his brother (Carl Bibby). Mr Bibby died from a cardiac arrest in circumstances where an ambulance had been called, but there were admitted delays in the ambulance attending. At the inquest, the jury heard evidence from a consultant in Critical Care & Emergency Medicine that had paramedics attended Mr Bibby before he suffered cardiac arrest, he would, on the balance of probabilities, have survived. Nevertheless, the coroner ruled that it was not safe to leave the issue of a causal link between the delay and Mr Bibby’s death to the jury. Mr Chidlow sought a declaration that the coroner acted unlawfully, an order quashing the record of inquest and an order that a fresh inquest be held before a different coroner.
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24 February 2022 by Guest Contributor
The UKHRB is grateful to Aileen McColgan QC for allowing us to republish her article, which originally appeared on Panoptican, a blog published by the barristers at 11KBW here.
The central question for the Supreme Court in Bloomberg v ZXC [2022] UKSC 5 was, as Lords Hamblen and Stephens put it (with Lord Reeds, Lloyd-Jones and Sales agreeing): “whether, in general, a person under criminal investigation has, prior to being charged, a reasonable expectation of privacy in respect of information relating to that investigation”. The short answer was “yes”.
The decision has been greeted with howls of indignation from Bloomberg but more muted responses from other sections of the press; whereas Bloomberg’s editor in chief released an editorial entitled “U.K. Judges Are Helping the Next Robert Maxwell” which stated that the judgment should “frighten every decent journalist in Britain”, the Financial Times and Guardian were more restrained, pointing out respectively that the decision would have “far-reaching implications for the British media” and would “make it harder for British media outlets to publish information about individuals subject to criminal investigations”. This is no doubt the case, but it is worth noting that the publication which gave rise to this decision was based on a highly confidential letter leaked to Bloomberg and occurred apparently without any consideration of ZXC’s privacy interests.
ZXC, regional CEO of a publicly listed company which operated overseas (“X Ltd”), sued for misuse of private information because of an article concerning X Ltd’s activities in a country for which ZXC’s division was responsible. The activities had been subject to a criminal investigation by a UK law enforcement body (“the UKLEB”) since 2013 and the article was based almost completely on a confidential Letter of Request sent by the UKLEB to the foreign state. ZXC claimed that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy in information published in the Article, in particular in the details of the UKLEB investigation into himself, its assessment of the evidence, the fact that it believed that ZXC had committed specified criminal offences and its explanation of how the evidence it sought would assist its investigation into that suspected offending. ZXC’s application for damages and injunctive relief was upheld at first instance by Nicklin J and £25,000 awarded: [2019] EWHC 970 (QB); [2019] EMLR 20. Bloomberg’s appear was dismissed (see Panopticon post by Robin Hopkins and [2020] EWCA Civ 611; [2021] QB 28.
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22 October 2021 by Tehreem Sultan
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) sparked controversy with its recent judgment passed down in IX v Wabe eV and MH Müller Handels GmbH v MJ. This case required the CJEU to again consider the right to freedom of religion. It ruled that employers can ban workers from observing religious symbols, including headscarves, to maintain a neutral image in front of its customers.
Case Background
This ruling was brought by two Muslim women in Germany who were suspended from their jobs because of wearing a headscarf. IX and MJ, were employed in companies governed by German law as a special needs caregiver and a sales assistant respectively. They both wore the Islamic headscarf at their workplaces. The employers held the view that wearing a headscarf for religious purposes did not correspond to the policy of political, philosophical, and religious neutrality pursued with regard to parents, children, and third parties, and asked the women to remove their headscarf and suspended them from their duties on their refusal to do so. MJ’s employer, MH Müller Handels GmbH, particularly instructed her to “attend her workplace without conspicuous, large-sized signs of any political, philosophical or religious beliefs.”
IX and MJ brought actions before the Arbeitsgericht Hamburg (Hamburg Labour Court, Germany) and the Bundesarbeitsgericht (Federal Labour Court, Germany), respectively. The courts referred the questions to the CJEU concerning the interpretation of Directive 2000/78. This directive establishes a general framework for equal treatment in employment and occupation.
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3 November 2016 by Guest Contributor
R (o.t.a. Johnson) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department [2016] UKSC 56
19 October 2016 – read judgment
Summary
In Jamaica in 1985, a baby was born to British father and a Jamaican mother. The child’s parents never married, and at the age of four he moved to the UK with his father. Under the law in force at the time, as an ‘illegitimate’ child, he did not automatically acquire British citizenship. If his mother had been the British parent, if his parents had ever married each other, or if an application had been made while he was a child, he would have become a British citizen. But he did not.
Two decades pass and the Secretary of State attempts to deport that individual, Mr Johnson, following a string of very serious offences. He appeals on the ground that deportation would be unlawful discrimination. If only his parents had been married, he would be a citizen and not be liable for removal.
The Supreme Court agreed. It held that there was no justification for someone in his position being liable to deportation simply through being born out of wedlock, which was an accident of birth over which a child has no control.
The Court also declared that a “good character” requirement for acquiring citizenship which applied only to illegitimate children was unlawfully discriminatory and incompatible with the Convention.
This judgment represents a further step towards equal rights for children born out of wedlock.
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2 November 2011 by Adam Wagner
Julian Assange -v- Swedish Prosecution Authority – Read judgment / summary
Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, has lost his High Court appeal against extradition to Sweden. He lost on all four grounds of appeal.
Unless he is granted permission to appeal to the Supreme Court under Section 32 of the Extradition Act 2003, he must now face charges of sexual assault and rape in Sweden. Appeals to the Supreme Court will only be allowed in cases where there is a “point of law of general public importance involved in the decision”.
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14 January 2018 by David Hart KC
R (o.t.a. Western Sahara Campaign UK) v. HMRC and DEFRA, Court of Justice of the European Union, opinion of Advocate-General Wathelet, 10 January 2018 – read here
The A-G has just invited the CJEU to conclude that an EU agreement with Morocco about fishing is invalid on international law grounds. His opinion rolls up deep issues about NGO standing, ability to rely on international law principles, justiciability, and standard of review, into one case. It also touches on deeply political, and foreign political, issues, and he is unapologetic about this. That, he concludes, is a judge’s job, both at EU and international court level – if the issues are indeed legal.
The opinion is complex and I summarise it in the simplest terms. But here goes.
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6 January 2011 by Adam Wagner
Updated | The government is soon to reveal the future of control orders, controversial anti-terrorism measure which have been repeatedly found by the courts to infringe human rights. But what are they? And why have they caused such trouble since they were introduced?
What are control orders?
Control orders are an anti-terrorism power which allows the secretary of state to impose strict conditions on a terrorist suspect (the ‘controlee’).
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1 July 2011 by Matthew Flinn
IR (Sri Lanka) & Ors v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2011] EWCA Civ 704 – Read Judgment
The Court of Appeal has rejected an argument that Article 8 of the European Convention of Rights (ECHR), the right to private and family life, requires that those challenging deportation and exclusion decisions on grounds of national security in proceedings before the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) have to be given sufficient disclosure of the case against them to enable them to effectively instruct the special advocate representing their interests.
In his book “The Rule of Law”, the late Lord Tom Bingham enumerated a number of sub-rules to give content to that cardinal, oft-cited but rather vague constitutional principle. Unsurprisingly, one such sub-rule was that adjudicative procedures provided by the state should be fair, an idea which found expression in documents as old Magna Carta. In turn, this entails that, as Lord Mustill stated in In re D (Minors) (Adoption Reports: Confidentiality) [1996] AC 593, “each party to a judicial process should have an opportunity to answer by evidence and argument any adverse material which the tribunal make take into account when forming its opinion”.
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4 March 2019 by Dominic Ruck Keene
The International Court of Justice has given a near-unanimous opinion that the separation in 1965 of the Chagos Archipelago from the then British colony of Mauritius was contrary to the right of self determination, and that accordingly the de-colonisation of Mauritius by the United Kingdom had not been in accordance with international law. The ICJ held that Britain’s continued administration of the islands was an internationally wrongful act, which should cease as soon as possible.
This is the latest in a long series of cases concerning the Chagossian islanders, the last domestic one being Hoareau last month, which summarises decisions so far. Also see [120]-[130] of the ICJ’s opinion for the back-story.
Background
The Chagos Archipelago consists of a number of islands and atolls in the Indian Ocean. The largest island is Diego Garcia, which accounts for more than half of the archipelago’s total land area.
Mauritius is located about 2,200 km south-west of the Chagos Archipelago. Between 1814 and 1965, the islands were administered by the United Kingdom as a dependency of the colony of Mauritius. In 1964, there were discussions between America and Britain regarding the use by the United States of certain British-owned islands in the Indian Ocean, in particular in establishing an American base on Diego Garcia.
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30 April 2012 by Wessen Jazrawi
Welcome back to the UK Human Rights Roundup, your weekly buffet of human rights news. The full list of links can be found here. You can also find our table of human rights cases here and previous roundups here.
In the news
A mixed bag this week: Theresa May remained in the news over Abu Qatada, a number of people blogged on the Brighton Declaration, and the issue of cameras and tweeting in court was high on the agenda. Closer to home, a team from 1 Crown Office Row is walking the London Legal Walk to raise funds for the London Legal Support Trust, the Free Representation Unit and the Bar Pro Bono Unit, so if you like the UKHRB, please sponsor them here.
by Wessen Jazrawi
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21 May 2018 by Conor Monighan
Conor Monighan brings us the latest updates in human rights law.
Credit: The Guardian
In the News:
An independent report into building regulations, commissioned by the government in the wake of the Grenfell disaster, has called for the current regulatory system to be overhauled.
However, the report surprised some because it did not recommend a ban on flammable cladding. It also declined to recommend stopping so-called ‘desktop studies’, where materials are tested without setting them on fire. The chairman of Grenfell United expressed disappointment at this conclusion. The Royal Institute of British Architects expressed support for banning inflammable cladding and the government has said it will consult on the issue. The Prime Minister has also pledged £400 million to remove flammable cladding from tower blocks.
The author of the report, Dame Judith Hackitt, said that banning the cladding was insufficient. Instead, she stated that a ‘whole system change’ is needed. Dame Hackitt warned that cost was being prioritised over safety and that ‘banning activities and particular materials […] will create a false sense of security’.
The report recommended fundamental changes to building regulations, saying that the process which drives compliance with the regulations are ‘weak and complex’. Dame Hackitt found that there was a ‘race to the bottom’ in the building industry that was putting people at risk. She also wrote that product testing must be made more transparent, and that residents’ voices were not being listened to.
The Grenfell Inquiry will open this week. For the first two weeks, the lives of those who died will be remembered in a series of commemorations.
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